Brazil’s environment minister Marina Silva said she hopes for heads of state arriving in Belém next week for COP30 to send a clear message on the energy transition in their speeches, and particularly on the transition away from fossil fuels.
“Our heads of state must think of sending a message on topics that are certainly the causes for climate change, which are: can we supply the planet with more renewable energy and can we have a just, planned, gradual and long-term decommissioning of fossil fuels,” said Silva during a press briefing on Friday.
At COP28 in Dubai, countries agreed on a landmark deal to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. But at last year’s COP29, governments failed to address this pledge after oil-producing nations blocked all mentions to fossil fuels.
The minister, a close ally of Brazilian president Lula da Silva, noted that this was the language agreed at COP, adding that “this should be for the ending of fossil fuels and deforestation.” “But,” she added, “this needs investment and planning. Things do not happen with magical thinking.”
Fossil fuel-producing countries – among them Brazil – still plan to produce more than double the amount of oil, gas and coal by 2030 than would be consistent with the 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement, according to a 2025 Production Gap report by a group of think tanks.
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The Brazilian COP30 presidency also reported that 57 heads of state are expected to participate in the leaders’ summit, a high-level section where countries send political guidelines for negotiators. This year, the summit will take place on November 6 and 7, days before formal talks begin on November 10.
In total, 143 delegations are expected to send representatives to the summit, according to the Brazilian government. Some delegations like the US and Argentina – both with anti-climate presidents – have not yet confirmed participation at COP30, they added.
Silva added that heads of state joining the Belém Climate Summit should set an early tone for negotiations on gender and climate adaptation, both of which are set to deliver outcomes at this COP. On adaptation, the Brazilian minister said messaging should include finance for developing countries and a key list of indicators to measure resilience to climate impacts known as the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA).
“If there is no global support for local responses to the impacts of climate change, the most vulnerable countries will keep paying the biggest costs,” said the Brazilian minister.
New fund set to be launched
On November 6, Brazilian president Lula da Silva is expected to host a launch event for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a new fund that would leverage public and private investments in financial markets and use the returns to pay tropical countries protecting rainforests.
The World Bank was recently confirmed as the interim host and trustee for the TFFF, which Brazilian officials said transforms the fund “from an idea into a fully operational reality”. Brazilian officials tried to appease concerns from developing coutnries, which have been critical of the bank’s role in the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.
“The World Bank will not set the priorities (for the fund). It is an operator,” Silva told journalists at the briefing. “The TFFF does not lose any controls from donor and recipient countries because it is being operated by the World Bank. The advantage is that the World Bank operates with AAA titles, which makes the TFFF structure viable.”
So far, Brazil and Indonesia have announced the first contributions to the TFFF, both with a $1 billion investment. The fund’s concept note says that the fund should ideally have a startup capital of $25 billion in public funds and $100 in private investments. Brazilian officials say this figure does not need to be met at COP30, but that the fund must receive political backing.
Donor countries, who are expected to pledge new funds at the leaders’ summit, have posed “tough questions”, a Brazilian TFFF official told a panel hosted by Climate Home News. “It seems Ethiopia may be more willing to commit to this than the UK and France,” he joked.
Mauricio Carvalho Lyrio, secretary for Climate, Energy and Environment at the Brazilian Foreign Relations Ministry, said at the press briefing this Friday that “we have very positive expectations that Brazil will have good company in terms of new announcements.”
The post Brazil’s environment minister urges heads of state to address fossil fuels at COP30 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Brazil’s environment minister urges heads of state to address fossil fuels at COP30
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amount of global warming – and whether the Paris Agreement temperature target can be met – depends on when net-zero is reached.
Many global pathways that have been set out for achieving net-zero, including a majority of the IPCC-assessed pathways where global warming is limited to 1.5C, rely on the use of CCS at fossil-fuel plants and industrial sites.
“These models have been quite instrumental in bringing CCS back onto the agenda,” Lina Lefstad, an ecological